This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 12th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If transportation planners' plans would snarl traffic and make cities less livable,

then the question has to be asked. What is it that they want to achieve?

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole says it's simple.

Planers plan for where you live and how you get to work.

O'Toole is author of the new Cato book The Best Laid Plans, How Government Planning

harms your quality of life, your pocketbook, and your future.

A lot of your book deals with issues that are related to Portland, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, do you find in

looking at planning issues around the country that it's essentially the same all over or are there real strong differences in how planners approach urban areas?

I think planners everywhere want to do what Portland is doing.

We saw recently Congressman Jim Oberstar from Minnesota tell Portlanders that they are providing

the template for transportation planning for the

rest of the United States and we see planners in

Minneapolis where Jim Oberstar is from

and in Denver and in uh... various other cities around the US saying let's do what

Portland is doing let's put our money into rail transit instead of into

highways that's resulting in a lot more congestion, a lot higher tax burden, and in many

cases poorer transit service because people instead of having a direct transit bus from their neighborhood

to downtown now have to take a bus to a light rail and then get on a light rail

and take that somewhere and then sometimes get off of that and get on a bus to go somewhere else.

So it ends up making a trip a lot more complicated.

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